Anne Hutchinson, Sectarian Mysticism, and the Puritan Order

Abstract

Anne Hutchinson has been one of the few women to attain canonical status in the history of colonial New England. Her marvelous intellectual abilities (so unusual in a seventeenth-century woman), her popularity among Boston men as well as women, and the powerful political and theological implications of her challenge render Hutchinson a force that must be explored if colonial Massachusetts is to be understood. Not only are historians fascinated by this extraordinary woman herself, they are intrigued by the colony's response to her; for in that very response the founders may have revealed their essential character. So a few books and many articles have analyzed and reanalyzed Hutchinson as victim of Puritan injustice, as threat to the Puritan experiment, as menopausal neurotic, as antinomian heretic, as rebel (occasionally a protofeminist one).